


These Walls

by story_monger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Experimental Style, Gen, POV Second Person, Thingstiel, gencest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 17:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The house is a sad, slumping little thing. It’s a gray, one-story ranch style that is all boxy and practical, squat against the wind. It needs fresh paint and for the rotting plants in its front beds to be cleared out. It's no place for an angel to inhabit, but here they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Walls

Afternoon is a sunken, yellow affair like a bruise.

“Storm,” Sam predicts. He’s curled up against the far door, the window fogging rhythmically with each exhale. His eyelids hang at half-mast and his shoulders are drooped and relaxed. You offered a blanket a few miles ago, but he’d looked at you like you’d offered him a slicker in a desert, so you’d left it.

“Hungry?” you ask your brother. Sam shifts a little, purses his lips.

“Not yet,” he says. Figures, but you have to ask.

You refocus on the road and the beat of white lines on gray pavement. The scattered remains of a possum (a raccoon?) approach and you can’t avoid treading it. The Impala bumps ever so slightly. You look over. Sam didn’t notice it. You breathe again.

The Impala eats up miles of Arkansas farmland. (Ar- _kan_ -sas you recite in your head in an exaggerated rural twang.) The sky never makes good on its threats for storms, bruised clouds aside. It just shifts hues from yellow to orange to gray-purple to yellow again.

You can’t tell whether Sam is asleep. He seems to be drifting in between, which is place he likes to be these days. You think you can sympathize. Not awake enough to be overwhelmed by real-world physics, not asleep enough for the dreams of the Cage to hurt. Sometimes when Sam does this he likes to keep your hand between his and you feel him kneading your joints and bones like a stress ball.

Early evening becomes more prominent. You consider flipping on the radio to see what they get out here, but Sam is breathing so evenly that you don’t have the heart. You continue to watch fields and farm houses and silos swell and retreat in a rhythm you’ve known for so long you can probably recite it in your sleep.

“Mmturn right here.”

Sam rustles and expands, pulls away from the Impala door. You turn your whole head to him now to establish the nature of this new phase. It’s not a violent or fearful one; you recognize that with the alertness in Sam’s profile and the way he leans forward with both hands on the dashboard. You tap the brake pedal for the first time in a few hours.

“Turn right?” you echo. Sam nods.

“See that green sign?” he points. “Turn right.” He talks like he’s got a map in front of him and is navigating you to a place you both want to be. Sam wants to be there; you missed the memo.

The green sign is still a ways down the road. You tap the brakes again.

“What’s down there?” you ask.

Sam looks at you. His forehead is a landscape of wrinkles. _You must be stupid,_ he says in that expression. _What do you think is down there?_

You consider turning right and indulging Sam. It’s one more country road in a whole network of them. It’ll end at a farmhouse and then you can turn around. Sammy will be satisfied, probably.

“Turn right,” Sam insists again. He stares at you and waits for proof that you’re going to listen. The green sign swells in size. You flip the blinker, and Sam returns his attention to the windshield.

The road is called Timothy Lane and you wonder who Timothy was and what he did to get a rickity little gravel road named after him. Maybe he owns the house you’ll inevitably end up at.

Barbed wire and stained, leaning posts line the road to the right; probably cattle beyond that. The left contains scattered hay bales like giant, grazing straw-creatures. No buildings in sight. Sam squints ahead like this is the most important thing he’s done in a long time; his butt hovers above the seat.

You feel like an enabling Sancho Panza. Don Quixote’s just survived a few hundred years in Lucifer’s dog bowl, though, so you keep tilting toward the windmill.

You listen to gravel _chink_ against the Impala’s underside and hope it doesn’t damage her. You go down to the lowest gear.

Another five minutes of slow driving, avoiding pits in the road, watching grass ripple to the left and clouds mutter yellow and gray above. Then a single building on the horizon, and Sam inhales. His face is like a coon dog pointing, building up energy and focus that is both gratifying and nerve wracking. You can tell now, you won’t get away without knocking at the house’s front door and flushing out whatever Sam thinks is hiding there. Hopefully you’ll encounter a benign personality who will be genial about the whole thing and tell you about a cousin who “has some problems too” and you will grin too hard and Sam might or might not catch on to their implication. If it’s the variation with guns and itchy fingers, you’ll be less worried about getting shot and more worried about how Sam will react if he can’t see this thing through. You still remember what happened two weeks ago and you don’t want to recreate it.

The Impala bumps nearer to the house and you slow to a creep. You stop completely when a dirt driveway peels away from the road and shoots toward the house. Sam looks at you sharply. _What are you waiting for?_ his expression asks.

Nothing at all, is the answer. You spin the wheel and push the accelerator again.

The house is a sad, slumping little thing. It’s a gray, one-story ranch style that is all boxy and practical, squat against the wind. It needs fresh paint and for the rotting plants in its front beds to be cleared out. Closer still, and you come to the conclusion that it’s empty. No cars in sight, just one ramshackle little barn further down the driveway. No tractors, no farm dogs, no sign of life. So. Maybe no strangers to beseech but that doesn’t mean you aren’t wary.

Sam clacks the door open before you can roll to a complete halt, and by the time you struggle out of your seat he’s striding across a dead, yellow lawn the same color as the bruised sky. You make an abortive call to be careful.

Sam pauses suddenly in front of the three cracked concrete steps that lead to a cracked concrete porch. The porch has a hand-made, inexpert design to it. It wasn’t part of the original house; you can tell. Probably installed by someone with the skill to lay concrete and set wooden pillars, but not the sense of aesthetic to make it blend.

Sam climbs the three steps and immediately presses his forehead against the peeling slats between the mold-spattered front door and the dusty window. He breathes in, and you think to warn about lead paint. You immediately feel ridiculous.

You climb the three steps much more slowly, almost testing the weight with each tread. This house looks too old and pained to support your combined weights.

Sam is communing with it, his lips moving in breathy words, so you position yourself within arm’s length and wait. You could do this for hours if you need to, and you know that because it’s already happened several times. Sam once spent a day studying a sparrow’s nest in a park. Sometimes you ask about it, but the answers come obliquely. You suspect it has less to do with what’s outside than what’s inside Sam’s head. That’s fine.

Sam doesn’t take long this time though. Within twenty minutes, he stops whispering and pulls his head away from the house’s side. He looks at you and he smiles so wide his dimples are cavernous.

“Yeah,” he says like you’ve just asked a question. “It’s Cas.”

***

You both sit on the concrete steps because Sam won’t leave the porch. The sky darkens enough that the Impala becomes a shadow across the grass.

“Castiel,” you repeat. “Our Castiel.”

“Dude, I just said that, yes.” Sam looks expansive. “He’s here. It’s him.”

You twist around and look at the house again in case you missed something. You untwist and look at Sam. He’s still glowing, but you can see the doubt start to crowd in at the edges. He sees you’re confused. He can tell that the things in his head and the things outside aren’t lining up again. You reach out to touch the thick, canvas-like fabric of his jacket.

“Is Cas in the house?” you try.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees. He pauses. “No,” he adds. “He’s in the house but the way he was in Jimmy Novak.” You take a moment to rearrange this in your head.

“Cas is possessing the house?” you ask, and you don’t have the mindset to marvel at the oddness of that phrase.

“Yes.” Sam nods hard once. He feels he’s gotten through to you and you try to think of how to proceed.

“Sam,” you say, scooting closer. “Do you remember how…the last time we saw Cas?”

You shouldn’t be interrogating him like this. You should be accepting his words with nods and affirmative noises. But it turns out you can’t do that here, not when the last time you saw Cas he was oozing with monster ichor and slipping beneath black water without so much as a whimper. You realize that you’re grinding your teeth and when you force yourself to stop your molars hurt to their roots.

Sam tilts his head and gazes at you with such blatant tenderness that you nearly flinch backward.

“Yeah Dean,” he says. “I do remember.”

“So.” You cough and wonder if you really feel the concrete step tingle beneath your palm or you’re just being paranoid. “So now he’s here.”

“Mm.” Sam tilts his head and studies the house again. “He’s tired, but he recognized me, so that’s a good sign.”

You stare at your brother’s expression and think that you haven’t seen him so damn at peace in months. And it took a slumping old house to put it there. You lean forward and rest your elbows on your thighs, stare at the Impala and can see already what the next few days will entail.

“We can’t just leave him,” Sam tells you.

You sigh and scrub at your face.

***

You want to call Bobby while Sam digs the old sleeping bags and a duffel of clothes from the car. You palm at your cellphone and imagine what you can say.

Bobby, we’re in an abandoned farmhouse in southern Arkansas and we might be here for a few days.

Bobby, Sam has attached himself to an abandoned farmhouse in southern Arkansas.

Bobby, Sam tells me that he’s found Castiel possessing a farmhouse in southern Arkansas.

You don’t want to know the answer, in a way.

Sam shoulder-checks you as he passes you, the duffel hanging from one hand and the sleeping bag hooked over a shoulder. You glance at him quick enough to catch his expression. He knows what you’re thinking and he pities you.

You stay rooted in your patch of dead grass as Sam climbs the three cracked concrete steps and uses his free hand to wriggle the knob. It must be locked. It has to be locked. Sam says something you don’t process into words. The knob smacks and the door eases open.

You start moving again because no way you’re letting Sam enter an abandoned house without you.

The house is dark and smells like damp, mold, and abandon. You can feel thin floorboards that whine beneath your weight. Another few steps and the thin floorboards become thin carpet. You can’t see it but you can imagine it: dirtied beige with stains from the time the dog peed, from the time mom spilled her soup.

_Snick snick snick._

“Lights don’t work,” Sam announces. You hear a thump; he’s dumped the duffel to the floor. More treads.

“No one paying the electricity bill,” you say and try to follow him. You can’t see him.

“Yeah but…” Sam trails off. You hear more words that aren’t recognizable, more careful _snicks_ of an invisible light switch. You get antsy and throw up a hand trying to find your brother. Your hand meets a rough plaster wall. You spread your hand flat over it and keep still for a moment, Sam shifting and talking a few feet away. You narrow your eyes in the direction of the wall and try. You try, okay?

“That’s okay,” Sam says. You look in the direction of his voice and pull your hand away, but you let one finger drag along it as you drop your hand to your side.

“What’s okay?” you ask.

“We can try later,” Sam replies. You can’t tell whom he’s talking to.

More shuffling, and then a _click_. The electric lantern flicks on and bathes the walls and Sam in sickly light. The whole damn place is sickly.

“How long are we going to be here?” you ask Sam. He looks up from his examination of the thermostat.

“You don’t believe me,” he says. You stand there and feel helpless. Sam is always strides ahead of you when it comes to this stuff. He believed in God and angels before you did. He believes in people when you’ve forgotten how.

“Can you—“ you don’t finish. You shrug and offer open hands. “I don’t know.”

Sam rubs at the back of his head and looks around at the living room like he’ll find the right words on the off-white walls to make you understand. You imagine Cas going malevolent spirit and writing out a diatribe to you in ichor. You are struck by the urge to laugh and the simultaneous sense of how readily you want to believe this. Cas alive. Something in your belly explodes when you internalize the possibility.

“No, but see,” Sam starts up again. “He’s all over the place.”

“That doesn’t help,” you say. “I’m not like you, I’m not—“

“Busted up in the head?” Sam cuts in. He’s got hollowed cheeks and tight lips.

“You’re not busted up in the head,” you almost snarl. “You’re just caught in-between.” Trying to play by two different sets of rules. An emigrant returning to a homeland that has become foreign. Solider back from the trenches. You’ve thought about this for consecutive nights; you have a whole list of analogies.

Sam retreats a little, looks around the room again.

“You know how when someone’s behind you? And if it’s someone you know well enough, you can just tell? You don’t need to see them, but the smell and the sound is enough?”

“Sure,” you say.

“It’s like that,” Sam says. “I can hear his frequency and his wavelength. And there’s this ozone scent and that’s him too.”

You can’t ignore the buoy of skepticism (“Don’t come here, you’ll run aground”) but Sam is just…Sam needs this and he needs you to join in and it’s far from the first abandoned house you’ve lived in. Honestly, of all the things you’re willing to do for your brother, hanging around an old house shouldn’t even register.

“Besides,” Sam continues. “This is a safe place. Cas is safe.”

 _Cas broke your fucking wall_ , you want to snap. You don’t. You place you hands on your hips and nudge the sleeping bag at your feet and you don’t push the matter.

“I’m going to check out the other rooms,” you say, and it’s largely to keep yourself out of trouble. Sam doesn’t protest, just bends down to sift through the duffel.

You find a flashlight and leave him to it.

Beyond the bastion of the living room, you find a bare kitchen, a back porch, then a narrow, dark hall that shoots straight to a single mildewed bathroom with avocado-colored walls and toilet. Branching from this hall you find three empty rooms and a closet. One of the empty rooms has bright blue walls and you decide to move Sam in here eventually. Nothing about the house is remarkable. It looks like it was designed and built somewhere in the ‘60s by overly practical people who never spent much time here. Of all houses for an angel to inhabit, you sure as hell wouldn’t have pegged this one.

***

You and Sam sleep together these days. No one ever discussed it. It’s just easier to feel Sam tensing up in the middle of the night and try to head things off then. Better than waking up and realizing that your brother is tearing out his hair or is in the corner and unable to look up because otherwise he’s going to see his own guts smeared on the walls.

It’s why you abandon the sleeping bags in the end and instead sleep sandwiched between two rough blankets, limbs tangled and sour breath colliding against skin. The chill seeping through the carpet is just another excuse for Sam to bump his head up under your chin in a way that makes you think illogical things like, _He’s just a kid still_.

Sam falls asleep readily because the mundanities of existence tire him easily nowadays. You’re used to him sleeping away whole days while you maintain a low buzz of anxiety about the last time he ate.

You sleep on your back and stare up at a shadowed ceiling. The silence is oppressive, and you start to think too much about the fact that you’re surrounded by miles of empty farmland and have no electricity and no running water. No cell signal either; no Bobby.

Sam’s breathing whistles in and out; he sounds a little congested. You wouldn’t be surprised. His immune system is utter crap right now. You shift to you side and Sam responds by digging his forehead into your collarbone.

The house creaks. Settles into its foundation with a sound like a whining animal.

“Fuck, Cas,” you say out loud. “Keep it down.” You pause. The house remains silent. Sam shifts at your voice.

You bring up a hand to sift through his hair—greasy and unkempt—and squint at the walls and ceiling again. You think you can hear another thin whine, but who the hell knows if that means anything? Cas is a sideways little fucker anyway. He probably thinks there’s a good reason for ignoring you.

You huff and focus on your brother twitching and making aborted sounds in the back of his throat. You tell yourself you’ll sleep as soon as he quiets down.

***

Morning comes as ladders of dusty light between the slats of the window shutters. You watch the particles drift like debris in a yellow ocean. You only realize after several moments of this that you somehow fell asleep, and that this is you waking up.

You are on your side, and you lift your head a little. The living room is empty and you can’t sense any warm weight pressed against you. The shot of adrenaline is pungent in the back of your throat when you lurch to a stand.

“Sammy?” you say, all sleep-roughened.

“Here.” The voice comes from down the hall, from the open door of one of the empty rooms. You slacken, and the panic swiftly is replaced by annoyance. When you ease open the door, you discover your pain-in-the-butt little brother sitting crooked-backed beneath a window with his temple against the blue wall.

You halt.

The sunlight pours through him, like Sam’s corporeal body has thinned into an afterthought, leaving him with the just-visible aureole of light that saints in stained glass windows have. His flyaway hair is a halo.

He was supposed to be a king, you think in a burst. (The thought is intrusive, it belongs to someone else but now it’s yours.) He was supposed to rule and then he turned it around so he became the sort of king who took on the world’s debt and paid it all in one self-destructive motion. You don’t think you’ve ever understood this. It hits you now and you nearly prostrate.

Sam tilts his big, heavy head toward you. He’s fever-flushed and sweaty. He’s Sammy with too much forgiveness and too much love for his own health. You force your legs forward because yes, your brother is something bathed in holy fire but you’ve always been flippant with holy things.

“Hi,” you say in a low voice.

Sam holds up a hand, fingers outstretched. You clasp three fingers in your hand without thinking and can’t tell what he wants. Then Sam tugs down; you acquiesce. Your knees touch when you sit cross-legged beside him.

“How’re you feeling?” you ask.

“Better,” Sam says. He hasn’t pulled his temple from the wall. You examine his face—you have to look past the facets of this aureole surrounding him—to find that certain muscles in his jaw that are usually taut have relaxed; the veins on his forehead have disappeared for the moment. His entire body looks softer.

“Where are you today?” you ask.

Sam thinks. “Cloudy but not overcast,” he reports. You’ll take it. “Cas helps,” Sam adds.

“Does he?” you ask, and it isn’t as comparable to asking about imaginary friends as you’d like it to be. Sam nods; the smile in his lips is thoughtless.

“I’m trying to talk to him a little,” Sam says.

You shift, lean forward.

“Sam?”

“Hm?”

“What do you hear exactly?”

Sam lowers his gaze for a moment. “I don’t hear anything,” he says. “I just…sort of project.”

“And he projects back?”

“Yeah.” Sam looks at you properly again. “He doesn’t have ears or eyes anymore; houses aren’t alive. But angels are alive enough to haul it to somewhere in between. Not alive, but cognizant.”

You lean back on your free hand and exhale hard. Sam tilts his head.

“What?”

“What if it isn’t Cas you’re talking to?” you relent. “What if it’s something else? And even if this is Cas, Sam.” You hate yourself for this. “He did…why do you trust him now?”

Sam lifts his head properly and studies you for several seconds.

“I got to know angels pretty well,” he says. You nearly physically flinch back, but Sam’s grip on your hand has become iron-tight. “I recognize Grace when I smell it. This isn’t a spirit or a monster.” Sam tilts his head and the sunlight falls on his face in new facets. “And the guilt is so thick over everything,” he says. “I could taste it all the way from the main road. Sour like bad milk.” Sam shrugs. “He’s sorry.”

“Jesus, Sam,” you wipe a hand over your face.

“What?”

“Just…” You shake your head once and look down at the battered carpet. You can feel Sam’s thumb rubbing over your knuckles and get a spark of guilt that he’s the one comforting you. When you glance up he has his head against the wall again, eyes hooded but still analyzing you. He’s always done this; you can’t count the number of time you’ve felt those eyes on you. You shift your attention to the blue walls like you’ll find a face there.

“How did he get here?” you ask.

“That part’s blurry still,” Sam murmurs. “I guess he was lost. This was the best he could find. I dunno.”

“You okay?” you ask. He sounds like he’s fading.

“Tired,” he admits.

“’Kay.” You squeeze his hand. “You sleep then. You’re safe.”

The way Sam’s mouth curls at the corner makes you think he already knew that.

You sit and hold vigil while he drifts back into that in-between place. You can see his lids float up and down, his eyes unfocused but not gone. You listen to dust settling on the carpet and think about how quiet a house is when it doesn’t have humming refrigerators or central heating kicking on every half hour. When a bird takes off somewhere near the window you nearly jump out of your skin.

The sun shifts its angle across the carpet over the course of an hour, at the end of which you decide that Sam has entered proper sleep again. He’s slumped against the wall, and you try to devise a plan to move him at some point so he won’t wake up with backaches.

Before that, though, you give in to temptation and scoot to also press your temple to the blue wall so you face your brother and make a mirror image of him. You want to believe this, you mentally defend your actions. The want fills your chest, crowds into your throat, threatens to choke you.

It’s with your face against a wall and carpet crackling beneath your hand that you recognize that you won’t ever see Castiel again. Your Cas, the version who made faces when he was annoyed and touched your brow with two fingers to heal you and sat on park benches waxing poetic about humanity. That body is gone, swallowed up by the black water and Leviathan.

It’s bitter, but if you’re left with a collection of plaster and brick, it’ll be better than nothing at all. You’ll take this, you swear to god, this is enough.

You’re still there when Sam wakes up and he probably sees the weariness around your eyes but he’s too smart to mention it.

***

You’ve come to recognize that too many good days in a row have to end somewhere, so you’re ready when the next several days become a long gray landscape of Sam barely keeping pace. It hurts, because you can see him trying his best to keep his head above water and you see every time he looses the energy and sinks down. At that point all you can do is hold on to him and wait.

On one hand, a remote house in the middle of nowhere means that you don’t have to deal with people looking askance, asking if they can help, throwing Sam dirty looks, muttering names under their breathes that shove you this close to storming over and taking them down. On the other hand, you really wish you’d had prior warning about this venture because otherwise you’d have stocked the Impala better. Two jugs of holy water, a few cans of soup, and scattered bags of chips only go so far.

“We’re going to have to head into town tomorrow,” you tell Sam at the end of the fourth day in the house. You’re both seated on the porch again because the inside still smells musty and there’s literally nothing else to do—practically full-time Pioneer Day out here. Sam’s been doing that thing where his eyes track invisible movements and his jaw remains visibly clenched. You experience a flush of victory on his behalf when he tears his eyes away from whatever’s in the lawn and focuses on you.

“Yeah,” he agrees. His voice comes out shaky. He’s rattled but he’s trying so hard and you’re so fucking proud of him that your chest threatens to split open.

“We can stock up and then we’ll come right back,” you continue. You don’t want to make it sound like this is a trick to make Sam leave. You’re not about that.

Sam touches at the concrete steps.

“He’s glad to hear that.”

You keep your grin staid.

Sam’s eyes catch on the lawn again and he turns his head in that direction with one short twitch of muscle that sends his hair swinging. His face pales. You reach out to cover the back of his neck with one hand, start kneading at the muscles there.

“You remember it’s not real?” you ask in a low voice.

Sam nods. He’s shaking a little; you can feel the tremors beneath your palm. Foreshocks. You’re half waiting for the Big One.

“I remember, but I forget too,” he mumbles, all ashamed. Sam remains riveted by the lawn; you can see beads of sweat starting to pop along his forehead and his upper lip. He flinches suddenly and utters a muffled, “Oh god. Oh god, no no nononono.”

“Okay, okay,” you reach out and guide his head into the crook of you neck. “Okay,” you repeat and start running a hand up and down his back. Sam is trembling all over, and you can smell the terror on him. “Don’t have to look,” you say. “Just don’t look and it’ll be gone soon.”

“I can still hear them—” Sam flinches again.

You keep moving your hands over him, hoping the physical touch will ground him in this plane of his multiple realities. You stare up at the eaves of the rackety old house and think as loud as you can, _Now would be a great time to start cleaning up your mess, pal._

The house looks back forlornly.

When the shadows melt into proper night, the part of your brain that’s still scared of the dark for a damn good reason kicks in and tells you to get your shaking little brother inside. He’s falling deeper and deeper into himself despite everything; no good trying to guess when this episode will finish. You just nudge your shoulder and ease him to enough to a stand that he can shuffle inside. He grips your shirt the whole time like you used to grip your mother’s leg in the face of strangers.

You end up not bothering to change into anything more comfortable. Sam’s too blotchy faced and his breaths are too ragged, so you prop yourself up against the living room wall and rest Sam’s head on your thigh. You keep running your hand over his side, up into his hair and back again.

You don’t mean to drift off; you really don’t. It’s just that you can’t have scraped together more than four or five hours of sleep in the last few days and even then it was mostly dozing.

You have no idea what wakes you up, but then you’re too occupied by the damp furnace that’s practically crawled into your lap.

“ _Jesus_ ,” you hiss groggily, fumbling through Sam’s brazen attempts to burrow inside you. He’s pressed up so hard against your chest and midsection that you don’t need to touch his forehead to recognize that he’s burning up, and that makes your stomach sour.

You never know whether these sudden fevers are Sam’s immune system going haywire or something more supernaturally driven. They still scare the shit out of you whenever they pop up because they always, always flirt with temperatures high enough to warrant emergency rooms. So far you’ve managed to avoid that (you don’t want to even think about the kinds of questions people will ask if you bring Sam into a clinic with him running a hundred degree fever and babbling about Lucifer. Some part of you still believes in the social worker monsters under the hospital cots) but you’re waiting for the one that sweeps in and sets Sammy on fire, the one that won’t leave you with any other choice.

“Sam?” You try to find his face. “Sam? You here, man?”

Sam’s eyes are slits of glittering fever bright. You grip both sides of his face.

“Hey,” you say. “Hey, Sam, I’m here, okay? Sam?”

Sam’s eyes roll shut. The sick panic in your stomach roars higher. You need an ice bath except—

Except this fucking useless house has no fucking water. You sit frozen for a moment while Sam burns like banked embers all over you. A pond then. You’ll find a pond somewhere. Or you’ll find a neighbor willing to help. Last ditch effort, you’ll drive to the effing hospital.

You start nudging at Sam and he groans so low you can feel it vibrating through you. You brace yourself against the wall to lever to a stand when you realize that the plaster is smooth and cool. Chilly, almost.

“Okay,” you mutter. You maneuver Sam to the wall, arranging his floppy, hot limbs to lie against it. “I’ll be right back.” Left with no notion whether he’s heard you, you stumble through the dark toward the front door.

Something deep in the bowels of the house clatters. You freeze; it’s too sudden a noise to ignore.

From down the hall, you hear a _squee_ followed by the splatter of liquid.

You force your legs to start moving again, but this time down the dark hall. You knock against the walls because the space is too narrow. You crash open the bathroom door and discover a bathtub echoing with the sound of water crashing from a rattling, rusted spout. You collapse next to the ugly, avocado bathtub and thrust your hand into the water. It’s cold, gloriously so. There’s enough ambient light from the small window for you to see that the water is clear; you were half expecting something cloudy. When you bring a cupped handful to your mouth, it tastes nothing like the plasticky stuff from the bottles or the chlorinated city water. It’s something pure and almost sweet, though you never thought that you’d ever in your life call water sweet. There’s a tang of mineral, something earthy that makes you think of bedrock. Well water, your frazzled mind finally provides. Clean well water.

You stumble back down the hall and find Sam shaking almost uncontrollably. He radiates such heat that you feel it on your palms before you even touch him. He’s making ripped animal noises when you haul him to a half stand, but he follows you.

The water is still churning into the bathtub when you arrive with Sam. You focus on arranging Sam’s long body so you can lower him into the tub without banging up his head. You’re strong enough to manhandle him a little, enough to ease him into the water through his flailing.

Sam gasps when the water hits him, and you shush him through it. You keep his face elevated, splash water across his cheeks and neck. Sam’s heaving breathes become sobs, and you hear your name among the “god no” and “mom”.

Somewhere in the middle of this, the spout has stopped pouring out water. It just drips now and then, like it’s waiting.

***

Sam comes down from his fever reluctantly, but he does it within a few hours. You have to go look for a towel from the duffel so you can ease him from the tub and lead him back to the blankets. He goes so meekly, his hair in points around his face and his head bowed. You get him arranged on the floor again, and he’s back into honest sleep almost as soon as he’s horizontal.

You stand, arch your back, then steadily walk back to the bathroom. You ease open the door and discover that the bathwater, calm until now, is starting to swirl down the drain. There’s something demure and quietly proud about it (and no, you have no idea how you came to describing a draining bathtub as proud).

You remain there and stand witness to the water as it disappears with quiet gurgles. When the bathroom has fallen silent again, you venture to place your hand flat on the wall and try to sense something, but it just feels like old wallpaper.

You go back to the living room and realize that the first fingers of dawn have lightened the sky; they sneak into the room to give Sam a soft glow. You cross the room to wrestle open the window, and when you’ve succeeded you’re rewarded with a skein of cool, damp air.

You examine the tattered windowsill.

You’ll need to buy fresh paint.

 


End file.
